of sin, plunged him into gloom. Though
burdened in conscience with no crime, he was subject in a notable
degree to that malady of his world, the disposition to regard all human
kind, and himself especially, as impure, depraved. Often at the mercy
of his passions, he refrained from marriage chiefly on this very
account, the married state seeming to him a mere compromise with the
evil of the flesh; but in his house were two children, born to him by a
slave now dead, and these he would already have sent into a monastery,
but that human affection struggled against what he deemed duty. The man
lived in dread of eternal judgment; he could not look at a setting sun
without having his thought turned to the fires of hell, and a night of
wakefulness, common enough in his imperfect health, shook him with
horrors unutterable. Being of such mind and temper, it was strange that
he had not long ago joined the multitude of those who day by day fled
from worldly life into ascetic seclusion; what withheld him was a spark
of the ancestral spirit, some drops of the old Roman blood, prompting
his human nature to assert and justify itself. Hence the sympathy
between him and Basil, both being capable of patriotism, and feeling a
desire in the depths of their hearts to live as they would have lived
had they been born in an earlier time. But whereas Basil nursed this
disposition, regarding it as altogether laudable, Marcian could only
see in it an outcome of original sin, and after every indulgence of
such mundane thoughts did penance as for something worse than weakness.
His father had died in an anguish of compunction for a life stained
with sensuality; his mother had killed herself by excessive rigours of
penitence; these examples were ever before his mind. Yet he seldom
spoke, save to spiritual counsellors, of this haunting trouble, and
only the bitterness of envy, an envy entirely human, had drawn from him
the words which so astonished Basil in their last conversation. Indeed,
the loves of Basil and Veranilda made a tumult in his soul; at times it
seemed to him that he hated his friend, so intolerable was the jealousy
that racked him. Veranilda he had never seen, but the lover's rapture
had created in his imagination a face and form of matchless beauty
which he could not cease from worshipping. He took this for a
persecution of the fiend, and strove against it by all methods known to
him. About his body he wore things that tortured; he faste